Rather surprisingly despite its well documented thermal troubles, the desktop Haswell processors don’t use a lot of power even when overclocked, with Asus’s PR guru Raja quoting around 11 amps of current draw on the EPS 12v connector when a full load is being applied. Nevertheless the Z87 Deluxe features a overkill 16-phase VRM for the single input rail to the CPU’s FIVR (fully integrated voltage regulator), consisting of a re-marked 8-channel CHiL PWM, ON Semiconductor high+low side MOSFETs and iR3535M drivers.

One benefit of over-engineering is that the VRM heatsinks don’t even heat up much when in operation, so they don’t require active cooling, thus making it suitable to be used with trendy closed-loop liquid coolers.